“Affliction
as punishment” does not carry much weight among today’s theologians. Saddling
contemporary Christianity with that notion is truly not fair. But some of our
best minds are inclined to interpret hardship as an opportunity for spiritual
growth. Suffering can be understood as a test or an exercise. This approach is
better because it attributes tough love, instead of vengeance, to God. But it
is still problematic.

Let’s
begin with the “test of faith” view before dealing with the closely related
“spiritual exercise” theory. “Test of faith” regards affliction as a kind of
trial or temptation to measure the degree of faith the sufferer has developed.
The story of Job can be read this way, and I Peter 1:6–9 supports that view.[iii]
The problem with “test of faith” is that it posits a seriously flawed view of
God. Just ask: How do we feel about the cosmic proctor administering a moral
midterm? Louise Glück protests against that kind of God in her poem “Matins
(3)”:

It is hard to worship and adore someone who would
give us cancer to see how we handle it. Besides, this theory just doesn’t fit
with the rest of what we believe about God. Does God test our characters with
broken relationships, diseases, and social injustice? The notion is patently
absurd. Scripture is quite clear that God knows us quite well already:

Lord you have searched
me out and known me;

you know my
sitting down and my rising up;

you discern
my thoughts from afar.

You trace my journeys
and my resting places

and are
acquainted with all my ways.

Indeed there is not a
word on my lips

but you O
Lord know it altogether.

–
Psalm 139:1–4

One of the Church’s prayers begins, “Almighty God,
unto whom all hearts are open, from whom no secrets are hid.” God doesn’t need
to administer tests. The tragedies that we are calling “tests” are the sorts of
tests that might be dreamed up by Joseph Mengele. The God of Christianity does
not afflict us out of curiosity to see how we’ll respond. Louise Glück
protested against the God of the inhuman experiment, the God who “tests our
faith.” Then she quickly saw that the God against whom she rebelled was a straw
man, not the true God. In “Matins (4),” she writes:

The
only way to read the “test of faith” idea as saying something worthy of
consideration is to interpret the “test” not as an examination, but as an
exercise in faith. That idea has been embraced by notable theologians such as
Simone Weil, Diogenes Allen, D. Z. Phillips, and John Hick. They have offered
truly compelling arguments that God has designed the world as a spiritual boot
camp to whip us into shape.

The Christian tradition is
not alone in its claim that suffering can humanize us and make us wise.Aeschylus and Sophocles rarely wrote a play that did not include the line “I
have suffered into truth.” Undoubtedly, the idea of suffering as a way to grow
spiritually has deep roots in the Christian tradition, too. St. Paul said, “I
want to share in the sufferings of Christ . . . if I may somehow attain the resurrection from the dead.” St. Ireneaus, in the third century, taught that
evil was in the world in order

to help us to grow toward holiness.[vi]
Hebrews opines that “God disciplines those he loves” and that

“all discipline
is painful” (but not that all pain is discipline). In the fourteenth century,
Lady Julian of

Norwich prayed for the wounds of true contrition, true longing
for God, and a serious illness to purify

her soul. In her classic Shewings, she said the wounds of life
lead to greater honor and joy than we

We must acknowledge that
suffering and spiritual growth are sometimes, at least potentially, connected. In the Christian tradition, there are two versions of the idea that suffering
is good for us. A view that D. Z. Phillips calls the “Outward Bound” school of
theology holds that our own suffering poses challenges that enable us to
develop heroic virtues, and the suffering of others gives us opportunities to
practice mercy.[viii]

I call the other theory
the Casablanca school of theology
(“the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this
crazy world”).[ix] The
Casablanca school does not see God as

sending specific sufferings, but as
leaving the universe to function unrestrained and therefore with

amoral indifference to our well being. From the resulting hardships, we should learn
that we are

insignificant. This insight liberates us from our egos.

Both
views have some merit, but I cannot unqualifiedly accept either of them. As
with the “divine retribution theory,” this “spiritual growth” theodicy is
undercut by the facts we experience. So much suffering is grinding,
dehumanizing, and embittering. Suffering is as likely to disintegrate us as it
is to ennoble us. In Imagining
Redemption, theologian David Kelsey shares such a case study. Sam was a
little boy who contracted Guillain-Barré syndrome. It left him disabled and
behaviorally unmanageable. The strain drove his mother to suicide. His father
was then worn down by trying to care for Sam alone, leaving Kelsey to ask the
hard question, “What earthly good does Jesus do in this situation?”[x]

Does
this theology offer a God we can worship and adore? No. It reduces God to a
cosmic drill sergeant. That God-image may be more benign than the cosmic
executioner, who punishes us for our moral lapses, but it is still a
small-hearted God, using carrots and sticks to enforce his will. It is hard,
and perhaps not healthy, to love such a God. His character still smacks of
sadism.

So
how shall we sort out the truth from the falsehood in this approach to
suffering? It is crucial here to distinguish a cause from a purpose, and
a purpose from a justification.[xi]
Spiritual growth will not do as a cause of suffering. God doesn’t send
affliction like a thunderbolt to humble us. But our choice to use our suffering
as an occasion for growth is another matter. Purpose and meaning are not just
lying there before the event in an objective way for us to discover. Purpose
and meaning are fashioned by our own interpretation and actions. Suffering and
grief are sometimes somewhat redeemed from utter meaninglessness by spiritual
transformation. Suffering isn’t caused
by our need to grow, but we can grow through suffering and so give it a purpose or meaning.

The
possibility of making productive spiritual use of our suffering still doesn’t justify what happened to us. That would
be a false defense of evil and injustice. Simone Weil, of all people, a brave
fighter against fascism, certainly never intended that. Rabbi Harold Kushner
described what he had gained spiritually from the death of his son Aaron, but
acknowledged the gains did not justify the loss:

Spiritual
growth does not justify our suffering. But it can often paint the silver
lining. If Kushner had shriveled into bitterness when his son died, he would
have suffered just as much, perhaps more, but without finding any meaning or
value in it. In fact, it would have made the meaning of his son’s death even
worse. Kushner says:

We, by our responses,
give suffering either a positive or a negative

meaning. Illnesses,
accidents, human tragedies kill people. But

they do not necessarily
kill life or faith. If the death and suffering

of someone we love makes
us bitter, jealous, against all religion,

and incapable of
happiness, we turn the person who died into

one of the “devil’s
martyrs.” If suffering and death in someone

close to us bring us to
explore the limits of our capacity for strength

and love and
cheerfulness, if it leads us to discover sources of

consolation we never
knew before, then we make the person

into
a witness for the affirmation of life rather than its rejection.[xiii]

It is not always possible
to turn pain into wisdom and compassion, but when it is possible, it is a profound way to live through affliction. Making meaning is a spiritual
challenge life sets for us. We grow stronger in the process of trying to meet
it. The irony in Archibald MacLeish’s J.
B. is this: The “God” character is an immoral tyrant who subjects J. B. to
unendurable suffering just to win a bet. But J. B. makes meaning of his
suffering in the end, by resolving to love in spite of it all, knowing that
love entails suffering, but that same love makes life worthwhile anyway.

[iii]“In
this you rejoice, even if now for a little while you have had to suffer various
trials, so that the genuineness of your faith—being more precious than gold
that, though perishable, is tested by fire—may be found to result in praise and
glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed. Although you have not seen him, you love him; and even
though you do not see him now, you believe in him and rejoice with an
indescribable and glorious joy, for you are receiving the outcome of your
faith, the salvation of your souls.” The treatment of suffering in I Peter is, however, much
richer and more complex than this snippet would suggest. See Patricia M.
McDonald, “The View of Suffering Held by the Author of I Peter,” in Tambasco, The Bible on Suffering, 165–87. I would
call it the weak point of the epistle.

[vii] The idea that our
suffering and struggle with evil is an essential part of our spiritual growth
goes back to St. Ireneaus and persists today in the theology of John Hick
(ibid., 292–93).

[viii] D. Z. Phillips, The Problem of Evil and the Problem of God
(Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2005), 166, 179–80. Ireneaus, Hick, and Swinburne
are leading proponents of this approach.

[ix] Simone Weil, Diogenes
Allen, and D. Z. Phillips are proponents of this view. Allen insists that God’s
reality makes everything meaningful, even catastrophes: “[We] can trust that
what we are doing and what is happening to us from the operations of the
natural world and the social order make a contribution, even when we are not
able to see that they do. All moments of dismay and dryness, as well as times
of elation, make a contribution to that life which is being formed but which is
not visible to us, especially when we are in states of distress” (Christian Belief in a Postmodern World
[Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1989], 117). Later, in commenting
on Adams’s Horrendous Evils, Allen
implicitly acknowledges that horrendous evils may serve no good purpose, but
can only be redeemed by some counter-good that only God can offer. Simone Weil
is the greatest exponent of the view that affliction ennobles, but it should be
noted that Weil’s life makes her subject to Soelle’s accusation of masochism.